Small steps and giant leaps in the landscape

Abstract

For landscapes of field theory vacua, we identify an effect that can greatly enhance the decay rates to wildly distant minima--so much so that such transitions may dominate over transitions to near neighbors. We exhibit these 'giant leaps' in both a toy two-field model and, in the thin-wall approximation, amongst the four-dimensional vacua of 6D Einstein-Maxwell theory, and it is argued that they are generic to landscapes arising from flux compactifications. We discuss the implications for the cosmological constant and the stability of stringy de Sitter.